Carrie Mott, APJ Marketing and Business Development Leader at Dynatrace, talks to The Ortus Cub’s Sabrina Manansala about how she turned a passion for technology into a career in Marketing and why she believes virtual peer learning plays a vital role in business in 2021.
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Describe what your role at Dynatrace entails and what are you focusing on right now?
We definitely have one core focus. My team’s north star, for marketing and business development, is really ensuring that our customers’ experience and journey to intelligent observability is exceptional. The focus for me is really to help enable my team and the way I do that is through a combination of people process and technology. It’s a fairly diverse role and it means that during a single day, my calendar could be anything from go-to-market strategic planning, or business reviews, all the way through to hiring and enabling the team that sits across APAC and Japan, and certainly growing at speed to building customer journey workflows or working with futurists and some of our amazing technology leaders in our partner ecosystem. Or my favourite thing is spending time with our customers and helping them share learnings across their peer community, certainly across the region, but also across their own business through workshops.
Tell us about Dynatrace. What does the company do?
Dynatrace provides an intelligent observability platform with AI at its core. It helps technology leaders to do a couple of things: it helps them to deliver those seamless digital services that users expect to always be on and operational, but it also helps them to map all the dependencies of micro-services and infrastructure elements that sit underneath those services which can range to trillions of different dependencies. It then identifies the root cause of any issues or service degradations that might occur before they impact the customer. So Dynatrace not only helps you identify the root cause, but it’s got automatic self-healing that means that your customers don’t have to be impacted or experience any sort of issue with that service.
What type of new opportunities are there for B2B technology marketers today?
I think the opportunities are endless and that’s for a couple of reasons: one, you’ve got b2b buyers, particularly in the technology arena, that are behaving more like b2c consumers. The second thing is, as b2b technology marketers, we now own more of the customer journey than ever before. Lastly, because we’re all in this period of rapid change globally, a lot of businesses have been required to adapt and subsequently, there’s a huge amount of opportunity for b2b marketers to better engage through various different touch points.
Being able to personalise your offering and the value you can deliver is incredibly important. The big opportunity for all marketers in b2b or b2c right now is how we get more personalised messages at the right time and in the right place, while increasing the sophistication of that particular orchestration.
“The big opportunity for all marketers in b2b or b2c right now is how we get more personalised messages at the right time and in the right place.”
Can you share a little on your career journey & how you became a Marketing leader at Dynatrace?
I think I’ve been fairly technology obsessed since I was a small child, mostly because I was really fascinated by how technology was going to enable human beings to connect and communicate differently.
I feel like I’ve won the lottery because I’ve been able to turn that passion into a career and over the last 20 years, I’ve been working with leading technology brands both across Asia Pacific and globally to help them scale their businesses and to better connect with their customers, especially across digital forums. When I was approached by Dynatrace to help run their organisation of marketing and business development across APJ, I jumped at the chance. It ticks all of those passion boxes and it’s certainly been an incredible journey.
Do you think virtual events are here to stay?
Without a doubt, I think over the last year, marketing has had to really innovate. We’ve had the chance to run some incredible virtual events over the last year, with worldwide conferences for different technology leaders joining us through every timezone and sharing and chatting and having a little bit of fun. We call them “edutainment” events where we create experiences that are physical events combined within the virtual element to allow people to connect, engage and form trust.
The reason I think virtual events are here to stay is because we have seen decision makers from different countries and different industries that were never able to get together into a physical forum just based on time or cost or location, now being able to collaborate. What that means is an increased diversity of thought and with that comes better ideation and better innovation.
“My team’s north star, for marketing and business development, is really ensuring that our customers’ experience and journey to intelligent observability is exceptional.”
What’s the best piece of career advice you have received?
Your customer and your user experience is your north star. As long as you stay focused on that and you put the customer at the centre of anything you do, whether you’re in marketing or you’re in a technology role, you will be successful.
Success is a team sport. There’s no way we can be successful in serving our customers in any business without really collaborating across teams and welcoming the diversity of thoughts and ideas from each member of the team.
Remember to invest in yourself whether it’s learning or developing new skills but taking time out to invest in yourself. It’s very easy to get caught up with delivering actions without thinking about what your own roadmap, journey or goals. We’re all human beings and we have to keep in mind our work-life balance.
